An Analysis Of Cultural Elements In New Standard English For Senior High Students

Culture learning is one essential part of language learning, and it also plays animportant role of cultivating students’ comprehensive quality. The status of culture inlanguage teaching had reached an agreement in linguistic field. A large number ofscholars aboard and at home like Nelson Brooks, Robert Lado, Michael Byram，LiuRuiqing and Deng Yanchang have studied culture and culture teaching. In China,National English Curriculum (2001) and National English Curriculum for Senior HighSchool Students (2003) also emphasized the importance of culture in language teaching.However, the researches of cultural elements in textbooks, especially English textbooks,are not enough relatively.Textbook, as students’ major learning resource and tool, is essential for teachersto reach teaching goals and for students to master target language. It is also one ofbridges for culture transmission. However, a lot of textbooks with different qualities aresold nowadays. In order to find suitable textbooks for learners and assist them to get asmuch as culture knowledge, it is necessary to evaluate textbooks. Now, most highschools in Sichuan are using New Standard English which is published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research press. Can the cultural elements in these textbookssatisfy the requirements of culture in National English Curriculum for culture and thelearner’s needs? In order to answer the question, a systematic analysis for culturalelements is necessary.The present study was going to find out the characteristics of cultural elements ofNew Standard English, especially the characteristics of internationality of selections,macro-culture and micro-culture. Hoping to give some suggestions to the compilers andteachers. A table for cultural elements evaluation in this thesis was made based on thestudies of other researchers. At the same time, the author also reviewed the studies ofculture, the relationship between language and culture and culture in language teaching.The qualitative and quantitative approaches were used to classify and analyze culturalelements in New Standard English.Findings from the study revealed that the compilers pay attention to theinternationality of selections, emphasize the input of both native culture and targetculture; stress the representative of topics. However, there are some shortcomings ofculture elements in New Standard English, for example, the cultural topics are notover-all; American culture is overemphasized; the negative side of cultural elements isignored. The results of the study contribute to inspiring teachers to find appropriateways to teach culture knowledge, and giving some inspiration to the compilers toimprove the textbooks. Practical suggestions for teachers and the compilers are also putforward at the end of the thesis.